Prayer

by John Butterfield

Beating your head

on a rock

can surely be easier

and more satisfying

than this endless round of

asking

petitioning

hammering

and yet never seeming

to get in the door

no matter how hard the battering

standing always on the portal

in the hope

that the householder will

someday emerge

and reward his persistent carollers

if only for their persistence!

God Present and Speaking

By John Butterfield

God is present as we confer:

in the conflicting voices

struggling to consensus.

God is present in small voices

contending with the volume

of the powerful shouting.

God is present where principles

can't allow convergence or

ambiguous common mind.

God is present in argument:

weeping with the defeated,

rejoicing with the victor.

God is love and God is justice.

When love and justice triumph

then God has spoken indeed.

Adultery (Matthew 5:27)

by John Butterfield

Jesus said,

It is not the sweaty consummation,

writhing: energy to ecstasy

that is most destructive.

Much worse are the mental

unconsummated fantasies

that override commitment

and undermine reality.

That give imagined passion

the motivation and power:

dreaming driving drawing draining

relationships in the real world.

What can compete with the unbridled unreality

of obsession that leads to a madness of dislocation?

Creed

by John Butterfield






I believe in God
the father almighty
most of the time
but sometimes
I wonder
what life would be like
if I didn't.

If there was no moral origin to the universe.
If there were no origin in love
and no destination in love
just a rabid struggle for supremacy
without rules
in the short years of life.

If we lived and accumulated
and bonked and fought
and hid and cried
knowing that nothing meant anything
and all was ephemeral floss.

If the big brother house
were the model for life
and the animal instincts
we have mostly civilised
became rampart serpents
in the evolutionary struggle
of not so sociable
social Darwinianism.

As we trudge onward
on our return journey
to the primal slime....

I'd prefer to believe in God!


(The image accompanying this entry is one of the series of engravings by William Blake illustrating the story of Job)

Peter's wife

by John Butterfield



Simon Peter, first apostle, rock

foundation of the church

was a man with a mother in law

(so it says in the bible)

Who then was Peter's wife

who washed his clothes after he sank

trying to walk on water?

She who was left at home with the kids

while he went trailing around the countryside

following the dreamer of dreams

She whose mother was ill

and who persuaded Peter

if he needed any persuasion

to bring his healer friend

and heal her

If he was not fishing

where did she get money to

feed her inevitable brood of infants?

It is somewhat ironic

that the men who has since that time

claimed to sit in Peter's chair

have never had a wife!

Is that why she was erased from history!